Its sort of amazing to me: some of these antivirus programs try to cure the disease by killing the patient. Norton and McAfee have given my Windoze PC's nothing but fits.
AVG however is a nice, user-friendly piece of software that does its job and stays out of the way.
Until it, too, has a problem
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/12/02/avg_auto_immune_update/
I don't know of any antivirus product which runs locally on a computer that doesn't rely on file signatures to do all or much of its job. I'm currently using the Microsoft product, since it's free and I hope that it won't recognize a system DLL as malicious.
But signature-based a/v was effectively dead in the professional security community a long time ago - we all still have to use it, because it has some value some of the time, but we also all know that a moderately serious attacker will never be slowed down by it, and that the gangs who write worms and viruses are usually at the minimum days ahead of signatures and often months.
I was at a presentation some years ago where the folks presenting had screen captures of Russian-language chat boards which had maps of IP address space and ranges identified as containing early warning systems operated by the major a/v vendors.
The security vendors seed "honeypots" into residential address space deliberately to get the systems infected so that they have samples of malicious code to analyze. The virus vendors seed old, uninteresting viruses tweaked just enough to elude detection.
They keep track of which vendor recognizes which virus variant and when, correlate it with the seeding effort, and map the early warning systems.
The good, new stuff doesn't go to networks that are likely to be able to analyze it.
I used my PC as a media center for a bit, but I picked up a Western Digital TV Live unit and never looked back. I paid about 100 bucks for it, and last week I finally found something it couldn't do - I threw a 384 FLAC file at it, and it tried to play it but made not a sound - which was fine, as I was mostly interested in how the file sounded on the main system and don't have anything I actually listen to in high res format.
Shortly after the WD unit landed, I realized how badly I needed to be able to back up my systems at the house in a more professional way, and bought a NAS. The first one I had was very noisy, the current one is very quiet, but it means I no longer need a PC running in order to watch or listen - and if I'm working and need to reboot, I'm not also going to have to wait until it's back up to keep watching and listening.
So, even if you get to a point with the PC where it's reliably streaming for you, I still recommend having a NAS around for backup, wiring everything with gig ethernet - if it means crawling under the house, so be it - and using the NAS as a repository both for actual work (you can probably deduct the cost of putting it in and the cost of cabling as home office expenses) and for a central spot for music to land.
